Day: June 28, 2001

Andhra Pradesh’s Controversial Sterilization Program

The New York Times recently profiled the sterilization program used by the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh which has proven extremely successful, but also controversial.

India’s fifth largest state has seen a dramatic rise in the number of sterilizations. Five years ago, a little over 500,000 people were sterilized. Last year, more than 800,000 were sterilized. More than half the women in Andhra Pradesh have their tubes tied — one of the highest rates in the world. As a result of the massive increase in sterilization, Andhra Pradesh’s population growth has been falling faster than any other large Indian state.

The methods to achieve the high rates of sterilization are, however, controversial. The state sets specific quotas for the number of sterilizations and uses incentives to persuade recalcitrant people to agree to sterilization. People who are sterilized after having their first or second children move the front of the line for loans, housing and other government assistance.

The Times describes, for example, that the Vizianagaram district was short of its quota of 25,000 sterilizations near the end of the year. So it enlisted civic groups to donate clocks, steel, pots and other goods which it then offered as an incentive to encourage people to get sterilized. As a result the district did meet its targets.

Women’s groups and some health experts are highly critical of the policies saying they verge on coercion in such a poor area. One activist told The Times, “I’ve met people who work in villages there who tell me women were offered gold chains to get their tubes tied. if that isn’t coercion, what is?”

The sterilization efforts are also reminiscent of sterilization camps that were set up in the 1970s after Indira Ghandi suspended democracy in India. Many people believe Indian men were forcibly sterilized in such camps.

Source:

Relying on hard and soft sells, India pushes sterilization. Celia Dugger, The New York Times, June 22, 2001.

First the NRA, Now Black Democrats, Opposing Campaign Finance Reform

In May the National Rifle Association and Sen. John McCaine traded pot shots after the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre told ABC that the main purpose of McCain’s campaign finance reform bill was to short circuit the rights to free speech guaranteed under the Constitution.

LaPierre said,

It’s an American tradition that citizens … get to say anything we want any time we want about these politicians. Under the McCain-Feingold bill, if we speak out, what we’ll have to fear is federal investigation by the FBI and a federal prison sentence. … What that bill is for citizens is a Big Brother with a baseball bat.”

McCain responded by saying that the NRA was simply afraid of losing its “influence and access … and that’s really what this is all about.”

Now Salon.Com reports that as many as 15 to 20 members of the House Black Caucus may vote against the House version of the campaign finance reform bill. While the average House candidate raised a little over $900,000, members of the Black Caucus — who often run in heavily Democratic districts where there victory is all but certain — raised on average just under $500,000. Some of the members of the House Black Caucus fear the restrictions on campaign funding will make it harder for them to raise money.

This is especially ironic since most of these members have voted for such bills in the past when it was clear there was no chance they would actually pass.

Source:

Black Democrats vs. McCain Jake Tapper, Salon.Com, June 27, 2001.

McCain Battles NRA over campaign finance reform. The Associated Press, May 20, 2001.

Gillmor Doesn’t Get It

Dan Gillmor doesn’t have an e-mail address listed on his site or I’d e-mail him, but I think he and others who are trying to put an anti-MS spin on the Appeals Court ruling just don’t get it.

The court’s treatment of “tying” Internet Explorer to the operating system is surprising, too, in that it doesn’t absolve Microsoft. Instead, the court returned this piece of the case — a crucial one — to the trial court for further consideration.

So the breakup is out. But remedies for anti-competitive behavior are not. And the all-important findings that Microsoft has and abused its monopoly remain intact.

What Microsoft has won is time. It can continue its brutal practices for a while longer, building into Windows and Internet Explorer and Office any and all technologies that will further solidify the monopoly. It can extend its reach into new markets, using its $30 billion in cash (which grows by a billion dollars a month. The company surely figures that it’ll be entirely above the law by the time the law catches up.

Sure, and pigs might fly. First, the Appeals Court outright reversed the finding of fact that Microsoft had attempted to monopolize the browser market. Then it remanded back to a new judge the issue of whether or not integrating IE into the OS was legal or not.

But how is the DOJ going to prove that integration of IE into the Windows OS is violates the antitrust law when the appeals court has already ruled that the reasons outlined by Judge Jackson for concluding so don’t meet an acceptable standard of proof? Is the DOJ just going to pull additional evidence out of its hat? I doubt it. Furthermore, with Jackson off the case and being cited for his improper ex parte communications, a new judge is probably going to give Microsoft a lot more leeway to present their case than Jackson did in his court.

As for the remedies, they’re headed toward Microsoft but what are the odds this case will ever go before another judge? Very, very low. With the Appeals Court making a breakup impossible, Microsoft now has the leverage it needs to reach an advantageous settlement. This is a prospect the Justice Department is going to be very amenable to since it seems clear that John Ashcroft and the rest of the Bush administration don’t want this case.

This whole thing will almost conclude with a slap-on-the-wrist-fine and some meaningless agreement in which Microsoft promises not to enter into exclusionary deals with ISPs and to stop threatening competitors like Intel who want to enter into deals with Microsoft’s competitors.

Meanwhile, the legal coast is essentially as clear as it is ever going to be for Microsoft’s .Net plans for world domination.

Wired News on Supreme Court Freelance Ruling

Wired News has an article on the Supreme’ Courts ruling on freelancer rights that backs up what I pointed out earlier — this ruling not only won’t help but actually hurts freelancers since it gives an incentive to media companies to force freelancers to sign away all rights.

Kendra Mayfield writes,

Since the mid-1990s, most publishers have included all distribution mediums, including the Internet, in their contracts.

While the Supreme Court’s decision applies mainly to contracts that are several years or even decades old, authors are already feeling its impact.

Many writers who refuse to sign away their rights have been denied work. Those who do sign can no longer resell their own works to other markets — a practice that has long been a major source of income for many freelancers, [Miriam] Raftery said.

The Evils of Individualism

Bruce Brawer wrote an interesting review of Angela Dillard’s book, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. According to Brawer’s review, Dillard attempts to explain away the existence of minority conservatives by relegating their ideas to the main evil of Western political culture — the emphasis on individualism. Brawer writes,

This, she claims, is a consequence of the lamentable and misguided conservative fixation on the individual — and it illustrates the superiority of leftists’ emphasis on the group. (Naturally, she ignores the enthusiasm of left-wing academics for such pious, if sometimes notoriously unreliable, works of personal testimony as “I, Rigoberta Menchu.”) In a classic bit of doublethink, she refers to “the conservative desire to silence irreducibly different collectivities in the name of a constrictive and artificially singular American identity” — thereby elegantly equating individual liberty with oppression and enforced group think with variety.

The other day, completely by accident, I ran smack into an example of this. The College of Education at the university I work is dominated by a handful of extreme Left wing professors — the sort of people who have actually claimed in books that things like spelling tests are right wing conspiracies (I’m not making that up).

A couple weeks ago I had to drop off a contract in the same building where the education folks are located. As I was walking down the hall there was this huge display case filled with large posters. THe posters had been made by college students in education classes, and a little placard indicated these posters were chosen because they represented outstanding work by teachers-in-training.

All of the posters were well done, but it was the one displayed prominently in the middle of the display case that had me looking several times to make sure I understood its message. It was displayed in landscape format, and on the left side about a third of the poster was taken up with a huge symbol. The student had created a dollar sign – $ – with the “S” portion made out of pennies and the straight line made out of dimes. The space to the right was taken up by a single bulleted list which indicated an progression of ideas:

  • Competition
  • Warmaking
  • Individualism

The letters were very large and the student had decorated the insides of the letters with negative images relating to all three ideas. The clear implication was that money and capitalism lead to competition, warmaking and individualism all of which are tied up inextricably with each other. This idea is very in keeping with the ideological position that is included in texts that are required reading for most students who go through the education program here.

For example, the reason spelling tests are a right wing conspiracy — according to one of the most influential education professors here — is that inevitably some people do better on such tests than others which introduces ideas of individual merit and effort which are “reactionary” concepts.

WTO Orders U.S. To Lift Lamb(!) Tariffs

For the past few years the United States has applied special tariffs to, of all things, imports of chilled or frozen lamb meat. In May the World Trade Organization ruled that the tariffs were inconsistent with the WTO agreement and gave the United States 60 days to lift the tariffs.

Almost all lamb meat imports come from Australia and New Zealand. In order to protect farmers who claim they can’t compete with the imports, the United States imposed a 9 percent tariff in 1999, a 6 percent tariff in 2000, and a 3 percent tariff in 2001. Those tariffs, however, were for an initial quota. Lamb imports beyond the quota were taxed at a rate beginning at 40 percent in 1999 and falling to 24 percent this year.

A country such as the United States, which complains that developing nations hurt their economic prospects through protectionist tariffs for local industries, has no excuse for such blatant protectionism.

Source:

WTO urges US to lift lamb tariffs. The BBC, May 2, 2001.